Recent Headlines

“If Shakespeare had wanted civilized people to understand him, he would have written in French.”

These disparaging comments were common in the ante-political-correctness era.

“Wog” was a putdown by the insular English of the non-British world. Including the port of Calais, the first place most Britons landed on the continent, in Wogdom was a not-too-suble insult, as was the haughty Gallic assumption that cultivated people were fluent in French.

Clearly, the two nations did not like each other. They had spent much of their histories at war, and in 1895 almost went to war again over some obscure territorial dispute in Africa.

However, the French and British admired each other more than any other people — and politics is usually directed by perceived interests, not love or the lack of it, something we tend to forget. In 1914, the British government saw the economic and military superiority of the German empire as strategic threats; they no longer regarded Russia and France as such. Voila: WWI.

Observers of the current Euro crisis should keep this history in mind. National actions will be influenced, but not dominated, by popularity.

When an English newspaper headlines “Frog off, Hollande!” it has less to do with culinary taste than a perception that the German chancellor is more amenable than the president of France.

As for the cultural-superiority wars, these have gone on forever and show no signs of ending. The ancient Greeks equated civilization with language. People who spoke Greek had been exposed to cultivation; those who did not, by definition, were barbarians (barbaroi). Schooling, the gymnasium, created the aristocrats of Alexander the Great's empire.

Romans typically were more direct. “Civilized” people lived in cities, which are still defined by Latin, whatever language the inhabitants spoke. Greek xenophobia made an Athenian empire impossible because it restricted citizenship. In fact, the bedrock failure of the classical European culture was its inability to bring the masses within it.

The Greco-Roman world was a glittering spectacle, but it was made up of brilliant points of light scattered across a deep, rural darkness. The great majority of free citizens had no real access to its benefits. The vast majority of slaves worked in mines, or latifundia, where, unlike urban slaves, they could not expect manumission. Empires (and the Roman very much resembled, despite its external forms, the Han Chinese) create internal peace, but they also cause socioeconomic stagnation. Eventually, human empires demand more energy in their preservation than they can afford.

Europe was luckier than the great Asian empires, which exploded but then stagnated, because the Roman Empire fell.

America has been luckier than most parts of the world because our institutions have generally thwarted empire-builders — military, economic, political. Of course, most “great people” lust for empires and try to forge them — but we have collectively stopped the process through competition. Think about this: Think small, but grand.

Would it improve anything if one corporation (or a small clutch) dominated any market? Can the state survive the single rule of any one party? Can any organized religion defeat the euphoria of complete power?